Twelve Questions

Twelve Questions with Emily Perkins

Novelist Emily Perkins keeps company with Virginia Woolf in her latest book, The Forrests, according to reviews. Perkins is to promote NZ literature at the Frankfurt Book Fair with other Kiwi writers next month.

Novelist Emily Perkins. Photo / Richard Robinson

What literary figure do you most relate to?

It used to be Jo March in Little Women but now ... Well, I don't suppose I can really say Patrick Bateman - the anti-hero in American Psycho.

What book has most influenced you?

Probably a retelling of Greek myths by Leon Garfield, The God Beneath the Sea, with amazing and terrifying drawings by Charles Keeping. I couldn't say it's influenced me in any obvious ways (I haven't eaten my children or spent time in the Underworld, unless you count high school) but the deeply strange magic of those stories got under my skin from an early age.